How to choose delicious wine and not overpay

You can spend a lot of time figuring out for yourself how much you are willing to give for wine. And if for a holiday? And if you just have dinner at home? And if you sign up at work? Standing in the supermarket, we are sure that we understand the wine: we read the reviews, appreciated the bottle, looked closely at the label. But this is self-deception. And Lifehacker has proof.

Don't trust the price-quality trick

In 2008, a group of scientists published Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? in the Journal of Wine Economics, a noteworthy study "Does Expensive Wine Taste More?" 6,000 people were invited to participate, everyone was blindfolded and invited to blindly taste the wines and evaluate their qualities. Fantastic, but almost no one noticed the difference, and the most expensive was ultimately liked by everyone even a little less than the cheapest.

Earlier Research Shows Data Cited In The Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? that there is indeed a correlation between price and satisfaction with wine. People like more expensive things. But this happens because we believe: you have to pay for quality, and the price to some extent corresponds to the content.

In 2017, researchers from the University of Bonn (Germany) put Why expensive wine appears to taste better: It’s the price tag on the question of whether expensive wine actually tastes better. It turned out that yes, but there is a trick here. It is enough for us to think that wine is expensive to make it seem much tastier to us. If you fill three glasses from the same bottle, but specify the price for them at $ 3, $ 8, and, for example, $ 16, the last one will be tastier. In the subject's brain, the zones of motivation and decision-making will become active, and his hand will reach for an expensive glass to drink it to the end.

Marketing placebo. The beauty is that even if you drink a "dummy" and only call it expensive, the brain still perceives it as a value. Let's figure out how, knowing this, learn to choose wine.

Make a map

It is clear that a specific wine for a specific person can be more or less tasty. But in order not to fall into the trap of marketing and not overpay, it is important to listen to your own feelings, and not to criticism and comments of wine experts. For this, only trial and error is suitable.

Choose for yourself the price range in which you will study wine. Determine how much and how often you are willing to spend on it. And write it down!

Make a map of your wine adventures. You can keep it online and attach a photo of the label, so that later you can easily find out what you need in the store. Enter a rating system, such as 1-10 points, and try new things. Then in a month, six months, a year, you will know exactly what you love and how much it really costs to give for it.

Praise at a party

When you go to your friends or colleagues with wine, do a good deed for them: tell them that the wine is excellent and expensive!

In most cases, we forget brands and bottle prices a moment after we leave the rack. It is unlikely that someone will put bragging at your peak. Or, for example, just note that a sommelier friend advised you very much. So, without spending too much, you will make the wine much tastier. At least for the brain of those you treat.